Page 69 of Rejected Exile

Still, I'll never really trust him, or think of him as a friend. I don't think he would blame me for that. I'm just glad he was here while I was gone, watching out for my Dad in whatever ways he could.

Lance has already taken the big stack of important-looking manila folders upstairs to rummage through them, so I go ahead and open the creased blue folder, expecting to find some receipts stapled to an expense sheet, or something else frivolous.

What I find instead is a photocopied journal entry with a few notes written on it in my father's neatest, most meticulous style of handwriting.

And I have to read the notes four of five times for it to really sink in what I'm seeing.

"Lilah?" Cat's voice calls to me. "Something wrong?"

"Yeah," I tell her, a lump in my throat. "Everything is wrong."

Twenty-Three

Kieran

We gather in William's old office. Delilah has a pale, ashen look on her face that I've never seen before. It makes me want to reach out, take her in my arms, and hold her close.

But I can never.

I should never have touched her in the first place.

I know that—and I knew it when the wolf in me took over and demanded that I make her mine. Even now, I can still feel the weight of Finn's angry glare at my back, and I know I deserve it. No part of me should eventhinkabout holding Delilah, but I can't seem to stop wanting her.

Even while standing in her father's house, the echo of the promise I made him ringing out in my head.Never let Delilah return to Glass Pack Territory.

What if he only said that because of the curse? Would I be betraying him to encourage her to stay now that she's found her wolf? Is there a chance he would've wanted me to save her from it so she could stay here?

I wish he were still alive to ask. The tragedy is, if he were, his daughter wouldn't be standing right here in front of me.

"I don't know how to tell you all this," Delilah says. She has a thin blue folder in her hands, which trembles in her fingers. "It's not something I entirely understand myself. But I think it's real, and I think it explains... well, everything. Or at leastalmosteverything."

"What is it?" Lance asks, his entire body rippling with impatience. "If the curse has something to do with the river water that streams from the mountains—I've thought of that. The old peaks were once home to a dark witch coven, and it's possible if we change our water source, make sure it's clean, we could reverse the curse. It's expensive but—"

"It's not the water," Delilah says, her voice threaded through with anxiety. I have to clench my fists to keep from going to her. "I'm not even sure that itcanbe reversed. The journal doesn't really say what it's linked to exactly. But it does say how it came to be."

There's tension in the room as we all wait for her to elaborate. My throat feels dry, and I keep trying to figure out what to do with my hands.

If the curse can really be fixed, then that changes everything. It means that I could finally have a mate. I could even haveDelilahas my mate.

Even though it was the last thing her father wanted.

I dare to hope, even knowing I don't deserve her at all, as Finn's scorching disapproval beats at the back of my neck.

"Well?" Roarke asks, shifting his weight and staring at Delilah with a hungry look, desperate for answers. "Please, tell us. How did the curse start?Whydid it start? Surely we'll be able to reverse it if we know."

He almost sounds like he believes we can fix this thing. That'd be a surprise; Roarke has been a staunch believer that the best thing for the pack is to be taken over by another pack entirely. Maybe he's actually starting to hold out hope that he'll have a mate of his own one day. It's something I want for him, though I struggle to imagine any female who would be worthy.

"My father's file has a photocopy of a journal entry in it," Delilah says. "From what I can tell, it's pretty old—the date is obscured, but it's from the 1800s. It almost looks like a copy of a copy, or maybe a photo that wasn't taken well... that's beside the point.

"I don't know where my father found it, or why he didn't have it up here in his office. For all I know it was something he considered nothing more than a dead end. What Idoknow, based on his notes and some of the passages, is that it's a journal of the alpha of this pack more than a century ago.

"In the journal he writes that there's a cycle that happens in Glass Pack Territory, that's tied to the land and the mate bonds somehow. Every seventy-seven years, something changes in the magic of the shift for female werewolves."

She swallows, looks away, then back to us again, taking a deep breath. "Apparently, according to this alpha, he discovered that the origin of the change dated back one hundred and fifty four years. So long that his people had forgotten it."

"What kind of change?" Lance asks. "What do you mean? Did he say?"

"I'm getting to it," she says, sounding distraught. "Sorry, it's hard to explain, but I thought it would be better if I told all four of you at once instead of passing the journal entries around. They're cursive and a little hard to make out."

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